A little late, but just wanted to share some of the highlights of the first quarter of the year.

As a I shared in my previous post, I’m trying out Google’s Objective and Key Results framework for effective goal setting.

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Q1 Review

Overall Score: 0.76

• 0.63: Achieve a Health BMI
• 0.69: Build Clarity of Mind
• 1.00: Adventure
• 0.90: Fortify Tribe
• 0.80: Develop Craft
• 0.58: Financial Stability

 

Q1 Highlights

Some of the best, funnest and most productive things I did:

1. Meditating in the morning. 

I download the app Headspace and used it to learn to meditate and track my sessions. The guided meditation sessions were incredibly easy to follow and a great place to start for anyone who’s interested in developing this habit. Meditating in the mornings helped me start the day with a fresh open mind, and remain calm and focused throughout the day.

2. Caught up with old friends. (Both Panama and Canada)

I find it crazy that with the ‘everyday business’ we forget to stay in touch with important people in our lives. During the last quarter, I had a total of 12 catch-ups with old friends, 9 in person in Panama and 6 over Skype. It was great to just sit down and chat with old friends and see how everything had been these past months. The best part of it all, it didn’t really take more than 30 minutes a session, and I always came out fresh with new ideas to apply at work and in my personal life.

3. Getting Outdoors

Some of the funnest things things I did:

• Camped at La Yeguada
• Boogie Boarded at the beach
• Wakeboarded at NitroCity
• Hiked a nature trail in Gamboa
• Sailed through San Blas

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Q1 Retrospective

This section is about reflecting on how I leveraged the OKR framework to guide my goals and personal work.

 Did Well

1. Tied my goals and scores to a log of every activity I did.
   • I reviewed and updated the log daily. This made it easier to keep track of my progress.
2. Substituted some of the goals if I found they were poor.
   • Given it was a first time using this system, I gave myself the flexibility to make changes throughout the quarter.

Do Better

1. Sandbagging Key Results. 
   • Some of the Key Results weren’t ambitious enough and easily achievable in a 30 minute sit-down session.
   • Next quarter I will ‘stretch the goals’ more.
2. Rewarded Activities and not Output.
   • ‘Thinking is a Cop-out’. Some of the Key Results required me only to research, brainstorm and list ideas; but no further than this.
   • What I would do differently is consider the research and brainstorm as a necessary task for any key result, but not progress in and of itself.
3. Focus.
   • I had a total of 6 objectives and 33 key results. This was a result of poor synthesis and filtering.
   • Moving forward, I need to narrow down the goals and assign less, but more important key results to each.

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All in all, I found myself incredibly productive using the Objectives and Key Results. The framework made it easy to measure and track progress, and kept me focused on the goals.

In the next post, I’ll share what I Looking forward to getting started on Quarter 2!

Cheers till next time!